Marianne or Germania?

Marianne or Germania is the first comprehensive study of modern Alsatian history using gender as a category of historical analysis, and the first to record the experiences of the region's women from 1870 to 1946. Relying on an extensive array of documentary, visual and literary material, national and regional publications, oral testimonies, and previously unused archival sources gathered in France, Germany, and Britain, the book contributes to the growing literature on the relationship between gender, the nation and citizenship, and between nationalism and feminism. It does so by focusing on the roles, both passive and active, that women played in the process of German and French nation-building in Alsace.

The work also critiques and corrects the long-held assumptions that Alsatian women were the preservers, after 1871, of a French national heritage in the region, and that women were neglected or disregarded by policy-makers concerned with the consolidation of German, and later French, loyalties. Women were in fact seen as important agents of nation-formation and treated as such. In addition, all the categories of social action implicated in the nation-building process - confession, education, socialization, the public sphere, the domestic setting, the iconography of regional and national belonging - were themselves gendered. Thus nation-building projects impacted asymmetrically on men and women, with far-reaching consequences. Having been 'nationalized' through different 'rounds of restructuring' than men, the women of Alsace were, and continue to be, excluded from national and regional histories, as well as from public memory and official commemoration. Marianne or Germania questions,
and ultimately challenges, these practices.

About the Author:
Elizabeth Vlossak was born in Ottawa, Canada, but as the daughter of a Canadian Armed Forces officer, she grew up in various parts of Canada and Europe. After completing her undergraduate degree at Mount Allison University (New Brunswick, Canada), she moved to England, where she received a Master of Studies in Historical Research from the University of Oxford, and a PhD in History from the University of Cambridge. She has taught Modern European History at the Queen's University International Study Centre at Herstmonceux Castle (East Sussex), and at the University of Ottawa. She is currently an Assistant Professor at Brock University in St Catharines, Canada.